Week 6 Flashcards
Explain consciousness
Consciousness can be defined as awareness of your thoughts, actions, feelings, sensations, perceptions and other mental processes.
This definition suggests that consciousness is not itself a mental process but rather an aspect of many mental processes. For example, memories can be conscious, but consciousness is not just memory.
However, we still don’t have a fully integrated theory, let alone a testable model, of conscious experience.
Explain functions of consciousness
Monitoring mental events
Regulating thought and behaviour
What are the three levels of consciousness
Conscious level - the level at which mental activities that people are normally aware of occur.
Non-conscious level – a level of mental activity that is inaccessible to conscious awareness. For example, you are not directly aware of your brain regulating your blood pressure.
Preconscious level - a level of mental activity that is not currently conscious but of which we can easily become conscious. For example, what did you have for dinner last night? The information you needed to answer this question was probably not at a conscious level, but it was at a preconscious level and ready to be brought into awareness.
Describe cognitive science or cognitive neuroscience
when advanced brain-imaging techniques began to appear in the latter part of the 20th century, psychologists had the tools necessary to explore the relationship between conscious experience and brain activity. Most cognitive psychologists who study memory, reasoning, problem solving and decision making can be described as studying various aspects of consciousness.
Describe Dualism
ees the mind and brain as different. This idea was championed in the 1600s by the French philosopher René Descartes. Descartes claimed that a person’s soul, or consciousness, is separate from the brain but can ‘view’ and interact with brain events through a small brain structure called the pineal gland. Once a popular point of view, dualism has virtually disappeared from psychology.
Describe Materialism
suggests that mind and brain are one and the same. Materialists argue that complex interactions among the brain’s nerve cells create consciousness, much as hardware and software interact to create the image that appears on a computer screen. A good deal of support for the materialist view comes from case studies in which damage to the brain causes disruptions in consciousness.
Describe Theatre
consciousness is a single phenomenon, a kind of ‘stage’ on which all the various aspects of awareness converge to ‘perform’ before the ‘audience’ of your mind. Those adopting the theatre view see support for it in the fact that the same psychophysical laws govern our subjective experience of the intensity of light, sound, weight and other stimuli. It is as if each sensory system passes its information to a single ‘monitor’ that coordinates the experience of stimulus magnitude.
Describe Parallel distributed processing (PDP) models
escribe the mind as processing many parallel streams of information, whose interactions create the unitary experience we call consciousness. PDP models became influential when research on sensation, perception, memory, cognition and language suggested that components of these processes are analysed in separate brain regions. For example, our ability to perceive a visual scene requires the combined activity of many separate brain regions, some of which analyse what each object is, while others determine where it is. Scientists still do not know whether these parallel streams of information ever unite in a common brain region.
Four stages of Non-REM sleep are?
Stage 1—blood pressure drops, muscles relax and eye movements slow
Stage 2—sleep deepens
Stages 3 and 4—deep (delta wave) sleep
Sleep stages 1, 2, 3 and 4 are accompanied by gradually slower and deeper breathing, a calm and regular heartbeat, reduced blood pressure and slower brain waves (Stages 3 and 4 are called slow-wave sleep). When you reach stage 4, it is quite difficult to wake up. If you were roused from this stage of deep sleep, you would be groggy and confused. Together, these four stages are called non-REM (NREM) sleep because they do not include the rapid eye movements (REM).
How long does each cycle last?
90 minutes
Explain REM
After 30 to 45 minutes in stage 4, you quickly return to stage 2 and then enter a special stage in which your eyes move rapidly beneath their eyelids. This is called rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, or paradoxical sleep. It is called paradoxical because its characteristics present a paradox, or contradiction. In REM sleep, your EEG resembles that of an awake, alert person, and your physiological arousal – heart rate, breathing and blood pressure – is also similar to when you are awake. However, your muscles are nearly paralysed. Sudden, twitchy spasms appear, especially in your face and hands, but your brain actively suppresses other movements.
Sleep is a what rhythm?
circadian rhythm
Three main theories of why people dream
Psychodynamic view, Cognitive view, Biological view
Explain the Psychodynamic view of dreaming
asserts that dreams represent a window into the unconscious where latent content (meaning) can be inferred. According to Freud dreams are a disguised form of wish fulfilment, a way of satisfying unconscious urges or resolving unconscious conflicts that are too upsetting to deal with consciously. Sexual desires, for example, might appear in a dream as the rhythmic motions of a horseback ride. Conflicting feelings about a parent might appear as a dream about a fight.
Explain the Cognitive view,
posits that dreams are constructed from the daily issues of the dreamer. Some researchers see dreaming as a process through which all mammals analyse and consolidate information that has personal significance or survival value. This view is supported by the fact that dreaming appears to occur in most mammals, as indicated by the appearance of REM sleep. For example, after researchers disabled the neurons that cause REM sleep paralysis, sleeping cats ran around and attacked, or seemed alarmed by, unseen objects, presumably the images from dreams.
